the following article is apart of a chapter on Humans of Flat Design in my forthcoming book entitled “Neoliberal Kitsch: Online Art and Aesthetics in the 21st Century”.
It would be unwise not to speak a bit about the legacy and influence of Keith Haring in regards to commercial illustration and what some have called “corporate art” or the “corporate Memphis” design. There are a number of works and biopics with exhaustive details on his life and impact on the art world filled with information that goes beyond our purposes. What I rather wish is to comment on the works themselves, and Haring as a towering figure that blended street art, illustration and fine art. A blend of different avenues that are now common place in the halls of corporations, galleries and on the pages of UI website design.
Haring from the beginning of his affinity with Andy Warhol was a relentless self-marketer and master of selling credibility of the streets to posh fine art people looking for hip and fresh new styles to take up and sell. His distinct, repetitious and easily-produced style embodies what is a common designer trait that is almost taken for granted these days. Haring could pump out works at lightening speed, and more than that, create whole flat worlds in them teeming with activity, rituals, sex, movement, dance and verve. I do not wish to attack him, nor his personal life and untimely end. Haring is an artist's artist that took his style and designs to it's limits and created whole urban tapestries that defined a generation. He is an interesting case in that his style we would not immediately classify as Kitsch sentimentalism, but only later became Kitschified and markets as such. And this is was his genius and also subversive kernel in the works themselves.
you can put his distinctly flat human designs anywhere. They can dance upon any surface, textile, sticker, board room wall or gallery wall. In them these figures danced, had relations, meshed into one another and formed whole leviathan-like bodies out of their murals. They were cells in singular organisms of works defined by the colour choices and hard, graffiti-like lines guiding their motions on each piece. They no doubt were efficient flat designs that would pave the way for digital works well after Haring's passing. And during his life he marketed them as such with his unique DIY art “pop shop”. A store/gallery he encouraged “everyone to visit” in a quest to reach millions of people with his art. A noble, egalitarian sentiment that has become embittered over time as “HARING” the brand, the trade mark took over. This same ethos is of course the ethos of the contemporary Neoliberal order. An aesthetic regime of easily movable types and parts. Complete with a backstory of egalitarian inclusivity as a selling point. Haring, like Warhol, either unwittingly or knowingly unleashed the forces of commerce upon the work of art, and things have never been the same since.
Many people in the contemporary cultural left celebrate Haring for his AIDs activism, and his visual panacea of a time that was indicative of the 1980s. A time of excess, unbridled hedonism, sexual expression, the waning of values, the destruction of high and low culture that blending into one, where even an urban graffiti artist can achieve applause and recognition in traditional art institutions. What is often overlooked however, is Haring's early teen years, specifically his interactions with the Jesus movement in the 60s and 70s; many a religious themes run throughout his work, including the birth of Christ, all the way to the late 80s with visions of the apocalypse, of nuclear war, and the AIDs crisis. Personal faults and degenerate hedonism were things that Haring owed up to and near the end admitted was his downfall. And his works of religious figures, specifically Christianity and biblical eschatology reflected a side of him that activists and art marketers wish to ignore. Some of his most telling works were ones with the idea of the “Radiant Child” of the Jesus movement (a very hippie version of Christianity in America) atop mushroom clouds. Denoting a symbol of the destruction of innocence in the modern world. Or a man with a hole in his center surrounded by crosses, a piece wrapped in blood with the Virgin Mary and the like. All denoting a supreme sense of loss and a tearing away of sacredness in the times he lived in1.